Cinnamon Kiss (14 page)

She reached into her purse and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

“Raymond told me to give you this.”

I took the money even though I knew he’d see it as a down payment on the heist he wanted me to join him in.

THE ’56 PONTIAC PRIMO left for me was aqua-colored with red flames painted down the passenger’s side and across the hood. It wasn’t the kind of car I could shadow with but at least it had wheels.

Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat was the teddy bear I’d bought in San Francisco. It had been forgotten in our rush to the airport. Primo must have found it along with the pistol.

When I got home there was a note from Benny on the kitchen table. She and Jesus were going to Catalina Island for two days. They were going to camp on the beach but there was a number for the harbormaster of the dock where they were staying. I could call him if there was an emergency.

I showered and shaved, shined my shoes, and made a pan of scrambled eggs and diced andouille sausages. After eating and a good scrubbing I felt ready to try to find any trail that Cinnamon Cargill might have left. I dressed in black slacks and a peach-colored Hawaiian shirt and sat down to the phone.

“HELLO?” She answered the phone after three rings.

“Alva?” I said.

“Oh.” There was a brief pause.

I knew what her hesitation meant. I had saved her son from being killed in a police ambush a few years before. At that time she had been married to John, one of my oldest and closest friends.

In order to save Brawly I’d had to shoot him in the leg. The doctors said that he’d have that limp for the rest of his life.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins.” I’d given up getting her to call me Easy.

“I need to speak to Lena Macalister. She’s a friend of yours isn’t she?”

More silence on the line. And then: “I don’t usually give out my friends’ numbers without their permission, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I need her address, Alva. This is serious.”

We both knew that she couldn’t refuse me. Her boy had survived to shuffle in the sun because of me.

She hemmed and hawed a few minutes more but then came across with the address.

“Thanks,” I said when she finally relented. “Say hi to Brawly for me.”

She hung up the phone in my ear.

I was going toward my East L.A. hot rod when the next-door neighbor, Nathaniel Pulley, hailed me.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

He was a short white man with a potbelly and no muscle whatsoever. His blond hair had kept its color but was thinning just the same. Nathaniel was the assistant manager of the Bank of Palms in Santa Monica. It was a small position at a minuscule financial institution but Pulley saw himself as a lion of finance. He was a liberal and in his largesse he treated me as an equal. I’m sure he bragged to his wife and children about how wonderful he was to consider a janitor among his friends.

“Afternoon, Nathaniel,” I said.

“There was a guy here asking for you a few hours ago. He was scary looking.”

“Black guy?”

“No. White. He wore a jacket made out of snakeskin I think. And his eyes …I don’t know. They looked mean.”

“What did he say?”

“Just if I knew when you were coming back. I asked him if he had a message. He didn’t even answer. Just walked off like I wasn’t even there.”

Pulley was afraid of a car backfiring. He once told me that he couldn’t watch westerns because the violence gave him nightmares. Whoever scared him might have been an insurance agent or a door-to-door salesman.

I was taken by his words, though,
Like I wasn’t even there.
Pulley was a new neighbor. He’d only been in that house for a year or so. I’d been there more than six years—settled by L.A. standards. But I was still a nomad because everybody around me was always moving in or moving out. Even if I stayed in the same place my neighborhood was always changing.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look out for him.”

We shook hands and I drove off, thinking that nothing in the southland ever stayed the same.

M
y first destination was the Safeway down on Pico. I got ground round, pork chops, calf’s liver, broccoli, cauliflower, a head of lettuce, two bottles of milk, and stewed tomatoes in cans. Then I stopped at the liquor store and bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black.

After shopping I drove back down to South L.A.

Lena Macalister lived in a dirty pink tenement house three blocks off Hooper. I climbed the stairs and knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” a sweet voice laced with Houston asked.

“Easy Rawlins, Lena.”

A chain rattled, three locks snapped back. The door came open and the broad-faced restaurateur smiled her welcome as I had seen her do many times at the Texas Rose.

“Come in. Come in.”

She was leaning on a gnarled cane and her glasses had lenses with two different thicknesses. But there was still something stately about her presence.

The house smelled of vitamins.

“Sit. Sit.”

The carpet was blue and red with a floral pattern woven in. The furniture belonged in a better neighborhood and a larger room. On the wall hung oil paintings of her West Indian parents, her deceased Tennessee husband, and her son, also dead. The low coffee table was well oiled and everything was drenched in sunlight from the window.

When I set the groceries down on the table I realized that I’d forgotten the scotch in the backseat of my car.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the bag.

“Your name came up recently and I realized that I had to ask you a couple’a questions. So I thought, as long as I was comin’, you might need some things.”

“Aren’t you sweet.”

She backed up to the stuffed chair, made sure of where she was standing, and let herself fall.

“Let’s put them away later,” she said with a deep sigh. “You know it takes a lot outta me these days just to answer the door.”

“You sick?”

“If you call getting old sick, then I sure am that.” She smiled anyway and I let the subject drop.

“How long has it been since you closed the Rose?”

“Eight years,” she said, smiling. “Those were some days. Hubert and Brendon were both alive and working in the kitchen. We had every important black person in the country, in the world, coming to us for dinner.”

She spoke as if I were a reporter or a biographer coming to get down her life story.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was somethin’ else.”

Lena smiled and sighed. “The Lord only lets you have breath for a short time. You got to take it in while you can.”

I nodded, thinking about Feather and then about Jesus out on some beach with Benita.

“Alva called. Why are you coming to see me, Mr. Rawlins?”

While inhaling I considered lying. I held the breath for a beat and then let it go.

“I think Philomena Cargill is in trouble. Some people hired me to find her up in Frisco, and even though I didn’t, what I did find makes me think that she might need some help.”

“Why are these people looking for Cindy?” Lena asked.

“Her boss walked off with something that didn’t belong to him. At least that’s what they told me. He disappeared and then, a little while later, she did too.”

“And why are you coming to me?”

“I found a postcard from you in Philomena’s apartment.”

“You broke into her place?”

“No. As a matter of fact that’s one of the reasons I’m worried about her. They had her place up for rent. She’d left everything behind.”

I let these words sink in. Lena lifted her gaze above the glasses as if to get a better view of my heart. I have no idea what her nearly blind eyes saw.

“I don’t know where she is, Easy,” Lena said. “The last I heard she was in San Francisco working for a man named Bowers.”

“Are her parents here?”

“When her father died her mother moved to Chicago to live with a sister.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Her brothers are both in the service, Vietnam. Her sister married a Chinese man and they moved to Jamaica.”

There was something Lena wasn’t telling me.

“What’s she like—Cinnamon?”

“Reach over in that drawer in the end table,” she said, waving in that general direction.

The drawer was filled with papers, ballpoint pens, and pencils.

“Under all that,” she said. “It’s a frame.”

The small gilded frame held a three-by-five photo of a pretty young woman in a graduation cap and gown. She was smiling like I would have liked my daughter to do on her graduation day. The photograph was black-and-white but you could almost see the reddish hue to her skin through the shading. There was a certainty in her eyes. She knew what she was seeing.

“She’s the kind of woman that men hate because she’s not afraid to be out there in a man’s world. Broke all’a the records at Jordan High School. Made it to the top of her class at University of California at Berkeley. Ready to fly, that child is…”

“She honest?”

“Let me tell you something, young man,” Lena said. “The reason I know her is that she worked in my restaurant in the last two years. She was just a girl but sharp and true. She loved to work and learn. I wished my own son had her wits. After the restaurant closed she came to see me every week to learn from what I knew. She was no crook.”

“Did she have any close friends down here?”

“I didn’t know her friends. She saw boys but they were never serious. The young men around here don’t value a woman with brains and talent.”

“Do you know how I can find her?” I asked, giving up subtlety.

“No.”

Maybe I thought she was lying because all I could see was the opaque reflective surface of her glasses.

“If you hear from her will you tell her that I’m looking for the documents Bowers took?”

“What documents?”

“All I know is that he took some papers that have red seals on them. But I’m not worried about them as much as I’m worried about Miss Cargill’s safety.”

Lena nodded. If she did know where Philomena was she’d be sure to give her the message. I wrote down my home and office numbers. And then I helped Lena put away the groceries.

Her refrigerator was empty except for two hard-boiled eggs.

“With my legs the way they are it’s hard for me to get out shopping very much,” she said, apologizing for her meager fare.

I nodded and smiled.

“I come down to my office at least twice a week, Lena. I can always make a supermarket run for you.”

She patted my forearm and said, “Bless you.”

There are all kinds of freedom in America—free speech, the right to bear arms—but when the years have piled up so high on their back that they can’t stand up straight anymore, many Americans find out they also have the freedom to starve.

AT A PHONE BOOTH down the street from Lena’s house I looked up a number and then made a call.

“Hello?” a man answered.

“Billy?”

“Hey, Easy. She ain’t here.”

“You know when she’ll be in?”

“She at work, man.”

“On Saturday?”

“They pay her to sit down in her office when the band comes in for practice. She opens up the music building at nine and then closes it at three. Not bad for time and a half.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go over and see her there.”

“Bye, Easy. Take care.”

Jordan High School had a sprawling campus. There were over three thousand students enrolled. I came in through the athletic gate and made my way toward the boiler room. That’s where Helen McCoy made her private office. She was the building supervisor of the school, a position two grades above the one I’d just left.

Helen was short and redheaded, smart as they come, and tougher than most men. I had seen her kill a man in Third Ward one night. He’d slapped her face and then balled up a fist. When she pressed five inches of a Texas jackknife into his chest he sat down on the floor—dying as he did so.

“Hi, Easy,” she said with a smile.

She was sitting at a long table next to the boiler, writing on a small white card. There was a large stack of blank cards on her left and a smaller stack on the right. The right-side cards had already been written on.

“Party?” I asked.

“My daughter Vanessa’s gettin’ married. These the invitations. You gettin’ one.”

I sat down and waited.

When Helen finished writing the card she sat back and smiled, indicating that I had her attention.

“Philomena ‘Cinnamon’ Cargill,” I said. “I hear she was a student here some years ago.”

“Li’l young,” Helen suggested.

“It’s my other job,” I said. “I’m lookin’ for her for somebody.”

“Grapevine says you quit the board.”

“Sabbatical.”

“Don’t shit me, Easy. You quit.”

I didn’t argue.

“Smart girl, that Philomena,” Helen said. “Lettered in track and archery. Gave the big speech at her graduation. She was wild too.”

“Wild how?”

“She wasn’t shy of boys, that one. One time I found her in the boys’ locker room after hours with Maurice Johnson. Her drawers was down and her hands was busy.” Helen grinned. She’d been wild herself.

“I was told that her father died and her mother left for Chicago,” I said. “You know anybody else she might be in touch with?”

“She had a school friend named Raphael Reed. He was funny, if you know what I mean, so he never got jealous of her runnin’ around.”

“That all?”

“All I can think of.”

“You think you could go down and pull Reed’s records for me?”

Helen considered my request.

“We known each other a long time haven’t we, Easy?”

“Sure have.”

“You the one got me this job.”

“And you moved up past me in grade in two years.”

“I don’t have no job on the side to distract me,” she said.

I nodded, submitting to her logic.

“You know I ain’t s’posed t’ give the public information on students or faculty.”

“I know that.”

She laughed then. “I guess we all do things we ain’t s’posed to do sometimes.”